Democratic Individuality

In Democratic Individuality, I argued that at a high level of abstraction, modern conservatives, liberals and radicals believe that the best economic, social and political institutions foster each person’s individuality. Their differences are largely empirical or social theoretical. All clash with modern authoritarians. I will take up practical issues such as torture and the lineage of the neocons and link them to larger issues in how we conceive a decent regime, locally and internationally.

About Me

I am John Evans professor at the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver and author of Marx's Politics:Communists and Citizens (Rutgers, 1980), Democratic Individuality (Cambridge, 1990), Must Global Politics Constrain Democracy (1999) and Black Patriots and Loyalists: Fighting for Emancipation in the War for Independence (Chicago March, 2012).

Followers

Monday, March 30, 2015

Gil Caldwell wrote a letter on the election of Netanyahu, focusing on a remark in a Times' editorial about the racist ugliness of his campaign. Unfortunately though not surprisingly, The Times just ran a front page piece by Jodi Rudoren of Israeli leaders (ones who backed the slaughters in Gaza...) prating that Obama, who now names the Israeli con "game" about a two state solution, has "gone too far" in reassessing (despite massive U.S. military aid) its relationship with the Israeli government.

In addition the Republicans are suddenly joining Netanyhu in attacking "the Syria-Lausanne (the US/Europeans negotiators)-Iran axis." The Republicans always wanted to bomb that "other" who is President, now creepily labelled, once again, as "Hitler" - is there no execrable depth to which the Sheldon Adelson/AIPAC/Republican (and some Democratic) racists, primarily about Palestinians, but extending to anyone who disagrees with them - will not sink? See here and here.

***

By eating the Occupied territories in a second ethnic cleansing (the first was the Nakba in 1948), the attempt to create an Israeli state - a state of settlers fleeing Nazism - has now foundered (the leadership has now become the "Europeans," the enemy of those who once fought and fled Nazis). Having sabotaged the two state solution and cordoned Palestinians in a large open-air concentration camp - something I saw in the West Bank in my October 2012 trip with Dorothy Cotton and Vincent Harding, see here, here and here - the Israeli leadership has now steadily seized an illegally Occupied Territory in which long-standing citizens are made "resident aliens," dispossessed from their homes, usually as a step toward being "transferred."

***

There will either be the existing Israeli apartheid state, linked to the threat of regional and nuclear war - what Netanyahu and the Republican expansionists seek in Iran, something threatening wider and even more chaotic (the vile ISIS, Shia militias which oppress or do ethnic cleansing and the US bombing of Tikrit - already chaotic) regional war, with Israel, a small country ruled by crazed racists with nuclear weapons - or there will be one democratic state with equal rights for each citizen. The latter is plainly morally desirable.

***

There is also some chance, as Rabbi Michael Lerner says, that a Palestinian demand for equal rights inside one democratic regime will drive Israel to concede a second state, "let my people go."

***

"One person, one vote" has a deep resonance in the United States, led by a willingness to stand up and suffer violence in the civil rights movement.

***

Lerner says beautifully for Passover that Pharaoh Netanyahu and his racist coalition need to be stopped (see below). Moses has become a Palestinian or an Israeli like Amira Hass or Anarchists against the Wall.

***

The haunting spiritual "Go Down Moses," long sung by slaves and in the civil rights movement, is often incorporated at Passover (it's second verse, unfortunately, repeats the tale of Jahweh's barbarous slaughter of the first sons of Egyptians, part of an exterminating mentality, murderous of children, even in what is otherwise resistance to oppression, which Jews and others should work to overcome). See here.

***

Gil Caldwell invokes the shining rabbi Abraham Heschel who, about Selma, said: "It was as if my knees were praying when I marched."

***

Let us join with Boycott and Divestment and every mass, nonviolent movement of Palestinian resistance.

***

Reverend Caldwell adds that as white Americans were taken by racism (a form of divide and rule used by the elite to impoverish them or send them off to fight imperial wars), so most Israelis, suffering impoverishment - apartments beyond reach - and fear of death are hurt by the reactionary policies of the Israeli elite and need a two-state solution or, better, a one state democracy with equal rights (as in anti-apartheid South Africa).

***

Here is what reverend Caldwell wrote to me after Netanyahu spoke frankly to the racists who elected him (as with Germans once upon a time, the stirring of a large racist movement has taken long work by Israel, facilitated by the United States and of course, though sometimes critical of it - see below - campaigned for in the New York Times as in the grotesque Rudoren article or the publication of an op-ed by John Bolton urging bombing of Iran, that is, naked American aggression, a neocon specialty. Try Bolton's argument on the "need" of Russia to grab the Crimea - something that would never appear in the Times - and you see the grisly policy at work here...

***

For ugly, Gil uses the synonym demonic - for the reasons given above sadly, that is an apt word:"Alan, I think of you as the Scholar Activist and I am the Non-Scholar Activist. We have not met personally, but we have "met" through the life and spirit of our friend-in-common, the late Vincent Harding. You have introduced in the way you have published my writings, a form that I find fascinating. In a Jazz music like way, you respond to my writings through interventions of your own through commentary, additional insights and resources that have produced a Gilbert Caldwell/Alan Gilbert distinctive epistle. I hope you will do this with the following.The lead editorial in today's (3/18) New York Times is titled; "An Israeli Election Turns Ugly". This sentence in the editorial jumped out at me with such force that I am compelled to respond. "Prime Minister Benjamin Natanyahu's outright rejection of a Palestinian state and his racist rant against Israeli voters on Tuesday showed that he has forfeited any claim to representing all Israelis." Years ago, a friend, in moments when there was an expression of prejudice, bias or hatred, she would respond by saying, "God don't like ugly". There is an ugliness about the actions of Prime Minister Nantayahu and of the actions of the Republican leadership that brought him to Washington to speak that is at best frightening, at worst, demonic. The ugliness of a Republican Party in the USA that is so fearful of our nation "walking its talk" of "out of many one", "we the people" etc. that it has turned to the suppression of the voting of black people (and students) and is doing all it can to restrict immigration from Mexico. Some would say that this is being done because of the fear of the coming "majority of the minorities" in the USA, and therefore the "browning of America". How strange it is that those who revere the Constitution, celebrate the Statue of Liberty, and boast of "American Exceptionalism" seem to want to be the gatekeepers that create a democracy that is selective. [Yes; nonetheless, this nativism of settlers, coupled with genocide toward indigenous people and blacks, has long characterized the American Right]. Composed only of people "who grew up like we did" and "love America as we do". (Words of a former Mayor of New York). The ugliness of Prime Minister Netanyahu who seeks with the Republican Party to engage in setting foreign policy that excludes President Obama. And,in Israel to suppress/ignore/minimize the votes of Israeli Arabs. When we were growing up, our grandmother, told us, "Children are to be seen but not heard". Blacks and Browns and students in the USA, in the minds and policies of the Republican Party, "are to be seen and not heard". And Benjamin Netanyahu wants the same for Israeli Arabs [the Palestinians in Israel and in Occupied Palestine}. The ugliness of those who historically and presently know what it is to be rendered the "other", the "less than", "second class", etc. who when they are "in charge" have no qualms about doing to others what has been done to them. There is a symmetry between the governing of Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel that historians will record that present day journalists may ignore. How is that those who are the leaders of nations that were birthed and born with visions of equality, freedom and justice for all, can apparently so easily became carbon copies of those whom they once claimed to resent and resist[!!]?The ugliness of politics in both the USA and Israel. Apparently, there are some Republicans who brought Prime Minister Netanyahu to the Congress to model what they want their presidential candidate to be and look like [the bizarre Straussian neocon Bill Kristol wishes for Pharaoh to be the next Republican candidate for President...]; One who demeans and dismisses President Barack Obama, who pretends to favor one policy only to reverse that policy because it is politically expedient (once "yes" to a Palestinian state, only to say "no" to it, amidst a close election), a believer in a "cosmetic democracy", but in actuality maintains a democracy that treats some persons as being "more equal than others". (In both Israel and the USA, the "3/5ths a man" designation of blacks during slavery), is in practice and those who are so designated represent the colors of the human rainbow today. There was a justice and spiritual beauty in the presence of the late Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel as he marched with Martin Luther King in the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. I thought of his words spoken about that experience; "It was as though my knees were praying as I marched", as I read the news about the Israeli election. During the Civil Rights Movement, among the songs we sang, one had these words; "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me 'roun". Despite the ugliness of the leadership of President Benjamin Netananyu and the Republicans who used him and he them, to elevate some while suppressing others in both Israel and the USA, my hope is that millions of Israeli's and Americans will realize how they have been used and abused. Used and abused to suppress the human rights of those with limited power. We cannot in the 21st century allow "Ugly" leaders and their policies to "turn us around", whether they are in the USA or Israel, from becoming a "Beloved Community" of justice, equality and peace.

Gilbert H. Caldwell

A retired United Methodist Minister

Asbury Park, NJ"

***

"Israel Faces Moses’s Demand to Pharaoh

The racist dishonesty of Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has challenged Judaism’s humanistic principles, as many young Jews will now flip the Passover script, putting the Palestinians in the position of Moses demanding “Let my people go” – or give them the vote in one state, writes Rabbi Michael Lerner.

By Rabbi Michael Lerner

What makes this year’s Passover Seders unlike any others is that a majority of American Jews have been forced to face the fact that Palestinians today are asking Jews what Moses asked Pharaoh: “Let my people go.”

The Israeli elections, and subsequent support for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s open racism and obstinate refusal to help create a Palestinian state, is not playing well with many younger Jews, and they will be challenging their elders to rethink their blind support for Israeli policies.

Increasingly, young Jews are on the Moses side, and see Netanyahu as the contemporary Pharaoh. So at the Seder more and more Jews will be asking Israel to “let the Palestinian people go.”

The easiest way ​for Israel ​to ​allow Palestinians their freedom is to create a politically and economically viable Palestinian state living in peace with Israel and based on the 1967 borders of Israel with slight border changes to allow Israel to incorporate the settlements in Gush Etzion and Jewish parts of Jerusalem that were built on conquered Arab land in 1967.

The terms for that agreement were well worked out by “The Geneva Accord” developed by former Yitzhak Rabin aide (and Ehud Barak’s Minister of Justice) Yossi Beilin, and would include Jerusalem serving as the capital of both states, massive reparations to the Palestinian people to help fund such a state (paid in part by the international community), and joint police and military cooperation, supplemented by international help, to deal with the inevitable acts of terror from both Israeli and Palestinian terrorists who would want to block any such agreement.

Though Prime Minister Netanyahu has now sought to back away from his unequivocal election commitment in mid-March that he would never allow Palestinians to have a separate state, it is clear to most American Jews that he was telling the truth to his own community when he made that commitment.

Only a fully unambiguous embrace of a detailed plan for ending the Occupation of the West Bank and the blockade of Gaza, and major unilateral acts on Israel’s part to begin to implement the creation of a Palestinian state, would be believed by any Palestinians at this point. And who can blame them?

But Netanyahu, like Pharaoh, has a hardened heart. Like Pharaoh’s dealings with Moses, he is likely to make statements seeking to appease the people he holds in bondage on the West Bank and Gaza, but when it comes to actions, he will give little but token steps that are not close to the freedom the Palestinian people rightly ask for themselves.

In a tragic reversal, we who had been oppressed now oppress, as though the psychological dynamic of the victim identifying with the oppressor is now playing out in a way that brings dishonor to the revolutionary vision of freedom that the Jewish people brought to the world and have celebrated for at least 2,000 years as central to Judaism.

Not that we had no warning — our Torah explicitly repeats over and over versions of the following theme: “When you come into land, do not oppress the stranger/other, remember that you were the stranger/other in the Land of Egypt.”

Given this reality, many Jews, and a disproportionately larger number of young Jews, will be asking a provocative question at their Seder tables: “If Israel won’t let the Palestinian people have their own state, then don’t we have to insist that the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza be given the vote?

“After 45 years of Occupation and subordination to the Israeli government, Israel can no longer claim to be a democratic society while denying the vote to those Palestinians who live under Occupation.

“If West Bank Palestinians and Gazans are not allowed the same rights as Jews living next door to them in West Bank settlements, how can we pretend that Israel is not acting as an oppressor and forsaking any claim to be a democracy?”

The call for “One Person, One Vote” has a strong resonance with the American people and with most people on the planet. It may even resonate with many Israelis who have memories of what it was like to live in societies that did not give Jews equal rights. But for other Israelis, that demand might be the one thing that would open them up to the need for the immediate creation of a separate Palestinian state.

Fearful that giving Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza the same rights already given to Palestinians living within the pre-’67 borders of Israel might give Palestinians real power to influence the outcome of elections, they might respond in the same panic that led Netanyahu to scare Israelis that they had better get out to vote because Israeli Palestinians were already going to the polls in large numbers.

The Palestinian Authority might find that adopting the demand for “​One Person, One Vote”​ might be the most powerful way to get the two states they’ve unsuccessfully sought up till now.

In my view, two states are preferable to trying a forced marriage between two peoples that have so much mutual suspicion – they need a clean divorce, not a shotgun wedding! But since Israel won’t give that divorce any other way, the demand for a fair marriage is better than Palestinians remaining a de facto slave to Israeli​ fears and Israeli power.

Passover Seders are all about asking important questions — this year, many American Jews are likely to be asking how Jews can celebrate our own freedom without insisting that Israel “Let their people go” or at least give them the vote!

Many younger Jews are good at sniffing out hypocrisy, and they may be causing a heated debate at any Seder that avoids this question.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine, chair of the interfaith and secular-humanist-welcoming Network of Spiritual Progressives, www.spiritualprogressives.org and rabbi of Beyt Tikkun Synagogue-Without Walls in San Francisco and Berkeley, California. He welcomes your responses and invites you to join with him by joining the Network of Spiritual Progressives (membership in which also brings you a subscription to Tikkun Magazine). RabbiLerner.Tikkun@gmail.com. [This story previously appeared at Salon.com.]

Thursday, March 26, 2015

I have now been involved in several issues of great public importance at the State Legislature. They reveal ordinary citizens, despite some lobbying by others (sometimes groups can hire lobbyists, but going in and talking to legislators is best), can sometimes – as historical situations change - affect central issues. That is a reason why the Koch brothers under Citizens United are trying to buy state and local elections, and something of great danger to America.

For instance, in 2014, when the lowest voter turnout occurred, the Kochs took over the Jefferson County School Board. The three in the majority strove to purge advanced placement American History courses of conflict, perhaps even the Declaration of Independence (Jefferson is dangerous!) to teach a fantasy. Fortunately, students protested. But of course, even the AP curriculum leaves a lot to be desired. See ''If they don't teach us civil disobedience, we will teach ourselves'" here and here.

***

There are, thus, surprisingly large consequences to local elections, surprising possibilities of ordinary people actually speaking up on important issues in a genuinely democratic way. For several of these measures, for instance, releasing the records of birth mothers and adopted children or speaking out against the bigotry long suffered by Native Americans, there is something liberating in standing up (this goes especially for movements of protest, but it is fascinating to see it, at work, in state government).

***

Lacy Jay, 7, Lakota, tells the Colorado State Ed committee that she is not a #mascot. We fight for youth like Lacy! - Simon Moya-Smith

***

There is, of course,
lots of money and lobbying at the state level; fracking, for instance, has a
big influence.Nonetheless, something
like genuine democratic politics from below can often occur without the kinds
of huge movements, such as the nationwide anti-war movements, needed to fight and finally, change
Washington.

***

For example, Paula Bard, my wife, worked on
a measure which passed that birth mothers and adopted children be clearly
recognized in birth records and these records be available.This was the first bill in this country – the
“Philomena bill” – to recognize this simple human need (it is important for the
children and grandchildren for medical purposes, and more deeply, to know who
they are).

***

Second, I
testified for State Representative Rhonda Fields’ bill creating a memorandum of understanding between
school administrations and the police to make police officers in the School not
usurp the authority of administrators and send students into the criminal
justice system.This measure is a blow
against the school to prison pipeline.

***

The third, two days
ago, was a measure barring Native American mascots/caricatures.

***

Joseph Salazar, Thornton, and Jovan Melton, Aurora,
introduced the measure on eliminating/recreating the Native American “mascots” of sports teams at
the Colorado House of Representatives on March 23.It called for the setting up of a committee
of indigenous people to work with schools about their names.It thus represented, as Steve Haas from
Arapaho High, testified a “middle way,” not simply deleting the offensive names
but calling on schools to work with this committee to transform them.For Arapaho High hasa relationship with the Wind River
reservation in Wyoming; four elders came from there after the shooting at Arapaho High in 2013 - the murder of Claire Davis - and played an important role in the grieving/healing. See here.

***

But if the school will not alter the mascot and atmosphere
through consultation, then a $25,000 fine per month would be levied until it
does

***

Salazar’s speech pointed to the Declaration of Independence. "All men have natural
rights to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness," he underlined, except
indian “savages” (this is a very important citation, one that criticizes George
III for stirring up “domestick insurrections” i.e. slave revolts against colonists
who treated blacks as property, as well as indian “savages” whose "known rule of
warfare is to kill all women and children." Jefferson was both a villainous slave-owner and dishonest here, since he knew that
this was “the white man’s” way of treating indigenous people – consider who did
the 1638 Pequot Massacre or later, Sand Creek or the Bear
River Massacre; in addition, different indigenous tribes fought
for both sides in the Revolution, notably the Narragansetts in the First Rhode
Island Regiment.

***

Salazar pointed to an early federal offer of $200 for bringing
in dead native americans.

***

He and Jovan Melton also flashed on screen standard racist
epithets used toward other groups and underlined that this was the only one
remaining by which we are not immediately repelled (he did not mention racism
toward Arab-Americans and Palestinians, which is still another bridge to
cross).

***

For the historical depth of the insight and the power of
their conviction, Representative Salazar. Melton and Rhonda Fields (another
co-sponsor) deserve a lot of credit.

***

It is particularly important that decent people of all races
now recognize the harm done to indigenous people in the original genocide from coast to coast –
see here for a timeline – in the imposed brutality and poverty and lack of
individual rights – no freedom to travel or seek work or rights in court - on
inarable reservations, in the continuing oppression.

***

Thus, indigenous children were still stolen
from their families in South Dakota and “adopted out” to whites in 2011 following
the US and Canada policy “kill the indian, save the man” – see "Lost Children, Shattered Families," National Public Radio here and my
Bonnycastle Lecture on Founding Amnesias here.

***

It is part of the democracy not to be a persecutor, that is, to head off brutality and fecklessness
among white students - this, an indigenous high school student stressed
strongly.

***

In addition, as Pastor Martin Niemoller said of the Nazis – Niemollder did not defend anyone’s else rights when the Nazis came for them and then, when they came for him, there was no one
left to protest - it is necessary for each of us to be an active defender
of the rights of each person.

***

A rule for a satyagrahi, a committed follower of nonviolence, Gandhi
says, is, for a Hindu, to protect a Moslem
from a Hindu mob with his life. This is what Gandhi did in 1948, why he was
murdered by the Hindu nationalist Nathuram Godse -
see the last chapter of Joseph Lelyveld, Great Soul.

This is what Marx meant by internationalism: to
defend the interests of the most oppressed, regardless of all nationality (see,
for example, the Communist Manifesto).

***

This principle is the life-blood of democracy as opposed to,
as Niemoller says, Nazism, the fascism of Netanyahu’s coalition for oppression of Palestinians in Israel, or the National Front in France.

***

The testimony was often heart-wrenching. An indigenous social worker testified, as did several others, to
the effects of stereotypes – the name Indians – in making indigenous students
doing less well on tests. See the 2005 resolution of the American Psychological
Association here and here.

This
impact is parallel to the effects on black people – see PBS's "American Denial" here - registered in the
brilliant and frightening doll studies by Kenneth and Mamie Clark, the first
two black Ph.Ds. in psychology. See here
and here.

***

She talked, as an effect of stereotyping and degrading, of the
very high rate of suicide among indigenous people.

***

She also talked about the racism her
daughters run up against in the schools (and the additional hardships created by
stereotyping).

***

A school board member from a rural school calling itself "Indians" testified about how the effect
of this naming was harmless and they would consult with local native americans
about it and changing it would cost too much money.

***

As if to prove his obtuseness to this profound issue, he
then left before the next 3 hours of testimony as was pointed out, movingly by
Simon Moya-Smith, the last witness.

Absent state action or large-scale protest, many testified that local school administrators and boards do not listen...

***

One high school
student described how awful it made him feel to go into that school –
shuddering, glad it was only for an afternoon - for a game…

***

A member of the
indigenous comedy group 1491 pointed out that branding high schools with names
like "Indians" and stereotypical images means that others routinely refer, as is
a regular barbarism in sports, to wiping them out – i.e. “Kill the Indians.”

***

The link to past
genocide, today’s trauma, and degradation are all too clear.

***

There was a very large attendance at the
hearing, perhaps 200. Twenty of those
who testified were students, mostly from high schools, but 6 from elementary school (Lacy Jay, above).

***

One told a story about her name being singled
out, circled by another student and mocked on facebook, when she made a sports
team. In that case, she talked to
authorities and the student herself, who saw that she had done harm,
apologized, and took down the facebook post (that seems a very healthy way of
handing this).

***

Steve Haas, a
social worker and parent at Arapaho High which has a relationship with the Northern Arapahos on the Wind Creek reservation in Wyoming spoke, in tears, about how
after the shooting at the school including the murder of Claire Davis in 2013, several people came from Wind River and helped in a four hour school meeting with
students and faculty about healing.

***

In my own
testimony, I commented on a powerful column in the Denver Post written by a young woman who
attended and was very grateful for this healing and the relationship with the
tribes. Yet she did not mention the Sand
Creek massacre – the driving even of determinedly peaceful Arapahos and
Cheyennes from Colorado – and probably didn’t know about it. Even in the midst of help and gratitude,
there is a founding amnesia. See "Arapaho High, Wind River and Sand Creek: a letter from Clint Stanovsky" here.

***

The testimony focused on the derogatoriness of the
stereotypes – though one high school student spoke eloquently about Sand Creek
- rather than a point, also important, of learning and honoring the truth, no
matter how painful.

***

Why are there no Arapahos at Arapaho High?

Why are there no Arapahos in Arapaho County?

***

It is a common for there to be a division of 6 to 5 in the
vote on the Education Committee, a party line vote. There is a kind of superficial game-playing to it which misses important, possible commonalities, for
example, repudiating this kind of prejudice and bullying is a non-partisan
issue. Thus, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Republican, proposed the Sand Creek
Massacre Memorial site and every Senator of both parties voted to fund it.

***

Some worried about an unelected committee of native americans, not
seeing that Representative Salazar’s purpose was to enable schools like
Arapaho High which has developed a moving relationship with Wind River to work for transformation.

But each representative could have responded to the issue she was troubled by,
made alternate suggestions to deal with the stereotypes. They could have stood up against racism and
for humanity.

***

Instead, they voted
“no.”

***

What Representative Salazar, Melton and Fields have done,
however, is something that the Cheyennes and Arapahos have spoken for. They do not want erasure of all the names, a
new form of amnesia (instead of ballyhoo for indian-killers and degrading
stereotypes, silence and pretence…).

***

But remaking the relationship with
consultation in a genuine way is the kind of thing the Cheyennes and Arapahos have worked
for. It would be a matter of grace for
all of us to work in this direction.

***

Recognizing the
truth about indigenous people, ruling out stereotypes, requires seeing - a painful matter - and
repudiating the genocide in America’s past.

***

An anti-racist society, one which guarantees
equal liberty of each person, a genuinely individual rights-upholding democracy
is a new thing in the world, something with great promise for healing and for
making a different kind of future. It is
this which the 200 people in the audience stood up for, the students heart-rendingly
spoke out for.

Erlidawn Roy, representing the Meskwaki, Ojibwe, Laguna Pueblo and the Isleta Pueblo tribes,
writes "I am not your mascot" on the face of LacyJay Lefthandbull, 7, from the Apache,
Pueblo and Lakota tribes, showing their support Monday for a House Bill that would
require public schools to get approval from American Indian tribes to use Indian
mascots and names. (Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post)

A national debate over the use of American Indian names for school mascots landed at the Colorado legislature Monday when a committee debated a measure that would allow a panel to decide whether a school district's depiction of an Indian mascot is respectful.

A number of witnesses who testified on behalf of House Bill 1165mentioned the tribe they belonged to and how hurtful it was to be depicted as a caricature, particularly a big-nosed, loinclothed savage, and to watch students do war chants and tomahawk chops at sporting events.

"We are not a Halloween costume," one crying student said.

"I am not a mascot," another witness said.

But John Sampson, a school board member with Strasburg 31J, testified against the bill, saying the district has been called the Indians for decades and uses the name with honor.

And two board members of the Cheyenne Mountain School District in Colorado Springs asked why local control was being given over to a subcommittee. Their school mascot also is the Indians.

The House Education Committee voted 6-5 on a party-line vote to approve the measure by Reps. Joe Salazar, D-Thornton, and Jovan Melton, D-Aurora.

The bill would create the Subcommittee for the Consideration of the Use of American Indian Mascots by Public Schools that would meet and decide whether a school — from K-12 to higher education — with an Indian mascot could continue using it. Part of the determination is whether the district has developed a relationship with a tribe.

Salazar said he found it unlikely the panel would approve of the Lamar High School Savages.

Rep. Paul Lundeen, R-Monument, was among the "no" votes, saying the conversation was important but noting some schools and teams have changed repugnant mascots without legislative action.

Salazar and Melton opened with a slide show featuring offensive nicknames for other ethnic groups, including the N-word. They said those kind of team names would never be tolerated and neither should names like Redskins or Savages.

Rep. Rhonda Fields, D-Aurora, demanded the slide show be turned off or she would leave. Fields, who is black, said she refused to sit in a committee with the N-word flashing on a screen.

Melton, who also is black, said it reinforced the point he and Salazar were trying to make, but the slide show was stopped.

Arapahoe High School students stand below a drawing of their mascot, the "Warrior," in one of the school's gyms. Nearly two decades ago, Arapahoe developed a relationship with the Arapaho Nation on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, and its logo was drawn by an American Indian artist. (Denver Post file)

Salazar said his measure is modeled after schools "that have done it right," including the Arapahoe High School Warriors in Centennial. Nearly two decades ago, the school developed a relationship with the Arapaho Nation on the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming, and its logo was drawn by an Indian artist.

The tribe immediately reached out to Arapahoe High after a fatal school shooting on Dec. 13, 2013, and performed a cleansing ceremony before it reopened, parent Steve Haas tearfully testified when he spoke in favor of the bill.

Darius Smith with the Colorado Indian Education Foundation also testified in favor of the measure, saying developing tribal relationships is a positive thing.

But some witnesses said an American Indian name or mascot should never be used.

Salazar said the bill is "not designed to get rid of anything."

But districts that continue to use a mascot that the subcommittee has rejected eventually would face a monthly $25,000 fine, an idea that doesn't sit well with Rep. Tim Dore, R-Elizabeth.

"It's political correctness gone amuck," he said. "We're talking about schools struggling to make payroll and buy supplies, and this bill would fine schools, which ultimately penalizes the kids."

Salazar said some bill opponents have talked about the expense school districts would incur to change uniforms, redo gym floors and such, which is why his bill includes a $200,000 appropriation.

At the time, schools defended their use of the names. For example, Yuma High School officialsexplained they used to be the Cornhuskers, but the name was changed early last century to honor American Indians. The principal at the time was steeped in American Indian history and traditions.

Some Colorado teams have already dropped their American Indian monikers.

Arvada High School switched from Redskins to the Reds in 1993, and the school stopped using its Indian mascot and adopted a bulldog.

The University of Southern Colorado — now Colorado State University-Pueblo — transformed from the Indians to the Thunderwolves in 1995, and Adams State College in Alamosa switched from the Indians to the Grizzlies in 1996.

Among the high school team names Salazar finds the most offensive: the Lamar Savages, the La Veta Redskins and the Eaton Reds, also known as the Fightin' Reds, where the mascot is an Indian with a misshapen nose, eagle feather and loincloth.

Eaton made national news in 2002 when a multiracial intramural team at the University of Northern Colorado lampooned it. The UNC crew called its team the Fightin' Whities, which featured a caricature of a middle-aged white guy with the phrase "Ever-hang's gonna be all white!"

Saturday, March 21, 2015

Steve Salaita was fired, outside all ordinary academic procedure and on a racist basis, by the President of the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. A Palestinian-American, his work focuses on indigenous people. He was hired with tenure in the Indigenous Studies Department at UICU from a tenured position at Virginia Tech. Faculty members - and decent people everywhere - are fighting for Salaita to be given his job honorably, but as with the election of Netanyahu, barbarism toward Palestinians - and those who recognize their humanity - is afoot in Israel and the United States.

***

Salaita recently wrote a piece about the countryside/geography of Occupied Palestine, and to what extent today it can be explored - across check points - by young people hiking. A central point is the olive trees, which I saw, some dating back 2000 years, on a trip with Vincent Harding and the Dorothy Cotton Institute in 2012. See "The Burning of the Olive Trees" here.

***

These are the livelihoods of families. What have the olive trees, praying, done to be burned by the Israeli settlers?

The face of the settlers in this last election is that of naked racism, Israel a "Jewish" authoritarian state, which many of us Jews - remembering the ghettoes in Europe and seeing the brutal treatment of the Palestinians by these would-be "Europeans" - oppose.

***

Netanyahu stands for experiments in weaponry - the rampant, repeated killings in Gaza - and striving to provoke larger war in the Middle East against Iran (where Israel alone has nuclear weapons and might well, if threatened, use them). But how does one silence, even in the New York Times, the extraordinary voice of racism which is now the policy/face of Israel? See Ben Norton's "The New York Times wrote a piece about Netanyahu's racism, then rewrote all of it" here.

***

Steve Salaita's words are powerful. He compares the mythology of Los Angeles - an imagined Mediterranean place with palm trees, Spanish settlers invoking Angels... - with Palestine, an Orientalized theme-park for Israeli settlers...

***

Here is what he says, rightly, about indigeneite (I walked around occupied Hebron on the Jews-only Shuhadeh Street, saw big signs for Judea and Samaria painted on...a military base, waited for some of our trip members who met with settler leader David Wilder, with his tzitzis (prayer beads) and Glock revolver, fresh from New Jersey. See here):

"There’s a certain way to show that Israelis are fundamentally outsiders to the land, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t much resonate in the United States, in no small part because Americans are fundamentally outsiders to the land they occupy, as well [the mass murderers, for instance, of the buffalo...]. I speak of olive trees, which exemplify the phrase “labor of love.” The trees take years to bear fruit. Once they do, though, they can provide for centuries. The curved, cragged trees, blending into the tawny environs of surrounding earth, are ubiquitous throughout the West Bank and the Galilee, often arranged in captivating symmetry. Nearly every Palestinian I know owns some type of olivewood icon.

Since 1967, Israel has bulldozed over 800,000 of them. Settlers routinely destroy orchards, having uprooted over 11,000 olive trees last year alone. Government officials cite practical reasons for the destruction, all of them involving the apocryphal word 'security.' Much of the time, however, they are simply being punitive.

A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. This reality clarifies the so-called complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Who is Indigenous, Jews or Palestinians? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. Who is the aggressor? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. Who has a deep history on the land? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. Who wrecks the environment with irresponsible human settlement? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree."

***

Implying the bloody analogy of genocide against American indigenes - see here for a year by year accounting from 1776 on of so-called Manifest Destiny and here - Salaita says:

"As to the people of the land, the Palestinians, they only figure into Zionist mythology as relics of the past, fit for display in shows of quaint nostalgia, never as agents fit for self-determination."

***

It is obvious why an American "University" would challenge a faculty member who writes like this: Palestine, (un)NaturallyIsraSteven Salaita on March 18, 2015

The following piece is a slightly modified version of a talk I gave on 2/13/15 the Palestine Center in Washington, DC. The talk was titled “Natural History Under Siege.”

The geography is dry and withered, humid and verdant, rugged and restful—a cacophony, but also an ensemble. It is a panorama of glorious, incessant contradiction. But not everybody can see it. For many, it is a simulation of ideology, a diversion into mythic cultural adventure, an insatiable geopolitical headache, an inaccessible aspiration, or an unsolved mystery. For the apostate and pious alike, it is always in some way holy. It will never be decolonized unless it is first demythologized. Settlement and myth are symbiotic.

Despite its continuous reinvention, we can still speak of Palestine as an actual place, with geologic formations and a climate classification and an observable ecosystem. Those phenomena undergo actual change. Humans physically experience their alteration. Flora live and die by them. Fauna migrate and immigrate to unnatural places.

The cultural history of Palestine’s landscape is also observable. I’ve heard many Palestinians note the visual similarities between their homeland and Los Angeles. Those similarities aren’t an accident. Palm trees are ubiquitous to LA, but none of them is indigenous to the city’s territory. They are an import from Mexico and North Africa to coastal southern California. Early settlers wanted to brand the region. (It explains a lot about the modern city, doesn’t it?) Conceptualizing dry, temperate Los Angeles as a tropical paradise proved farfetched, so they concocted a Mediterranean theme.

Many settlers were Spaniards with a religious mandate, so a Holy Land symbology emerged. This entailed palm trees, which inform important biblical events, including the story of Jesus’s birth. The trees also create a visual orientation in scriptural themes.

Images of Palestine (real and imagined) have also influenced literature, music, painting, fashion, architecture, and landscaping. Such images have likewise inspired conquest and colonization.

This is all to say that Palestine’s natural history is also profoundly artificial.

I have no ability to describe Palestine without yet again performing a reinvention, which makes the landscape so magical. I am convinced it has something to do with the difficulties of its political existence. On second thought, perhaps it has everything to do with them.

We can understand the entirety of the Israel-Palestine conflict by examining its physical effect on the land. The availability of space for human habitation illuminates the hardships of Israeli colonization. (Human habitation partners with military occupation to destroy the environment.) Where do Palestinians live? Maps show us the incongruous geographies of areas A, B, and C, but only life on the ground properly conveys Palestine’s fragmentation.

We needn’t contemplate where Palestinians live, then. It’s better to ask, “Where can they live?” The legal restrictions on their habitation are well-known, but the spatial limitations of their existence are more conspicuous. Israeli settlement consumes land and thus restricts space. It requires highways and walls and military installations. The West Bank is a bit smaller than Delaware. The portions of it under nominal Palestinian control could fit inside Jacksonville’s city limits. Though it doesn’t physically disappear, Palestine is forever shrinking.

Even where Palestinians reside, their inhabitance is never secure. Israel demolishes homes, seizes farmland, rezones cities, clean-cuts forests, flattens hilltops, and erects concrete monstrosities within and around villages. The Palestinian does not populate inorganic structures, but a luminous, living history. No bulldozer can destroy memory.

Memory enables Palestine to survive despite its persistent destruction. Israel has stolen millions of dunums of Palestinian land, with no sign of abatement. (The verb “appropriate” is more diplomatic, but I reckon we ought to use blunt words to describe ugly actions.) In 2014, the Netanyahu government claimed over 1000 acres of the West Bank for settlement expansion. The number of Jewish settlers creeps toward half a million. Israel siphons water and returns it to Palestinians in the form of sewage. It builds with no regard for the influence of human activity on the land.

Inside Israel, Palestinians are similarly restricted. Israel contorts geography for the sake of demographic expediency, preventing the reestablishment of depopulated villages and locating new developments in places that will ensure Jewish expansion while retarding the growth of Muslims and Christians. Nazareth Illit is one example. Built on the hills overlooking the ancient Palestinian city, most famous as the home of Mary and Joseph, Nazareth Illit—Upper Nazareth—exemplifies Israel’s desire for ethnocentric jurisdiction. Upper Nazareth, as its lofty name implies, seeks to recreate the city by mythologizing disappearance as an ancient reclamation project.

Thirteen percent of Palestine belongs to the Jewish National Fund, which has desired to refurbish the Holy Land since 1901. The JNF facilitates development, plants trees, sponsors public works, and manages parkland. The primary effect of its work has been to transform Palestine into an Orientalized theme park, open only to those of a certain ethnic background. It all makes more sense if we think of Israeli settlement as a form of geostrategic gentrification.

We can’t properly understand Israel’s most recent land grab without discussing what preceded it. Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s 51-day siege of the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014, left the territory in shambles. Gaza’s modern natural history can be summed by its role as clearinghouse for nearly two million non-Jews disallowed in Israel. Shortly after wrecking the Gaza Strip, leaving its population to suffer the fallout of structural and economic collapse, Israel announced its new settlement plans on the West Bank.

Israel has performed this strategy often enough for it to have become predictable: bomb Gaza, steal the West Bank. There is a horrifying logic to its colonial violence.

Still Palestine endures. Its Indigenes recall the landscape that sustained our ancestors and gave rise to our existence, in many cases a continent away. Palestine endures in the way we select olives from the grocery store; plant fig and citrus trees in our backyards; decry the mischaracterization of our cuisine; display pictures of Jerusalem; affix images of Handala to protest signs; and revive our forebears in the naming of children.

There’s a certain way to show that Israelis are fundamentally outsiders to the land, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t much resonate in the United States, in no small part because Americans are fundamentally outsiders to the land they occupy, as well. I speak of olive trees, which exemplify the phrase “labor of love.” The trees take years to bear fruit. Once they do, though, they can provide for centuries. The curved, cragged trees, blending into the tawny environs of surrounding earth, are ubiquitous throughout the West Bank and the Galilee, often arranged in captivating symmetry. Nearly every Palestinian I know owns some type of olivewood icon.

Since 1967, Israel has bulldozed over 800,000 of them. Settlers routinely destroy orchards, having uprooted over 11,000 olive trees last year alone. Government officials cite practical reasons for the destruction, all of them involving the apocryphal word “security.” Much of the time, however, they are simply being punitive.

A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. This reality clarifies the so-called complexities of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Who is Indigenous, Jews or Palestinians? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. Who is the aggressor? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. Who has a deep history on the land? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. Who wrecks the environment with irresponsible human settlement? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree.

Even if it is incomprehensible to capitalists, politicians, and much of the American public, it is the correct answer to any inquiry about instigations of violence: a Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree.

*****

There are feral dogs on the West Bank. They outnumber hyenas, which may not be extinct but are mostly the stuff of legend. The Anatolian leopard, a character in the bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh, is elusive and exhausted. Animals don’t recognize human borders. When we build fences between jurisdictions, we inhibit migratory patterns and mating rituals. When we use supposedly empty places to test weaponry, we degrade food and water sources through chemical pollution. When we move people into new places for the purpose of demographic engineering, we also affect the tenuous existence of flora and fauna.

I know about Palestine’s feral dogs from experience. I studied for a summer at Birzeit University, near Ramallah, in 2000. I remember the year well because soon upon return to my American doctoral institution, the second Intifada began. I was a terrible classroom student at Birzeit, but I nevertheless learned tons about Palestine. My education arose through all-night tea and hookah sessions with my Palestinian friends, the adhan reminding us finally to get some sleep.

On one of these nights I and a fellow student found ourselves about two miles from Birzeit with no transportation. (Even service drivers take a few hours to sleep.) Although we were invited to sleep in the home of our friend, it was a lovely evening, so we opted to walk. Just after leaving the small cluster of homes, dogs began howling in the nearby hills. A few soon came into sight, their growls a greater threat than any we had yet faced from occupation soldiers. We climbed a rugged slope and trekked across loose dirt and stones on the ridge alongside the roadway. When headlights approached, we jumped down and hitched a ride home.

The soil of Palestine was lodged beneath my fingernails for over a week. It’s one of the few moments of my life that the Holy Land was rendered tactile and knowable.

Feral wildlife has a long history in the region. Lions, crocodiles, cheetahs, elephants, rhinos, giraffes, and water buffaloes once existed in Palestine, evoking its African origin and orientation. We cannot attribute their disappearance to Zionist colonization. Yet we can attribute to Zionists the revival of at least one famed species, the camel.

Camels have been, and continue to be, crucial to the commerce of Africa, the Middle East, and Central Asia, but among Arab and Muslim Americans they tend to induce groans—not from any particular dislike of the animals themselves, but because of their uses in variegated Orientalist imagery. The camel is the great signifier of Arab culture in the West. Whenever a film wishes to denote or connote the Middle East, we hear canned ‘oud music and see sandy dunes traversed peacefully by a caravan of slow-moving camels, usually in silhouette with a blazing sun in the background.

Zionism reproduces this imagery for the sake of ethnic verisimilitude. When I was at Virginia Tech, a Hillel event celebrating Israel included a camel. (Don’t ask me how it managed to get a camel to Blacksburg.) In the touristy areas of Israel, one can take pictures of an authentic Bedouin and his humped conveyance. (To be fair, this is also true of Arab countries.)

Zionists play Arab to inscribe themselves as Indigenous to a foreign geography. Beyond their fondness for camels, they revived a version of Hebrew meant to sound akin to Arabic; claim as Israeli numerous dishes that existed well before 1948; and attempt architectural authenticity by erecting structures in the style of the actual buildings they destroy. It’s a reinvention of a landscape that was mythologized by the West in the first place. Israel has destroyed Palestine’s natural history physically and symbolically.

I am no botanist or biologist, so I am more comfortable discussing people than plants or wildlife. While biologists work with the human animal, I am too engrained in humanist traditions to rely on biology to make sense of culture or politics. Zionists, after all, created a nation-state based on the incongruities of biological determinism.

As to the people of the land, the Palestinians, they only figure into Zionist mythology as relics of the past, fit for display in shows of quaint nostalgia, never as agents fit for self-determination.

*****

My father in law was born in Beit Jala, adjacent to Bethlehem, and spent his first twenty years there before immigrating to the United States as a student. Nobody would rightly call him a quiet man. He is boisterous and gregarious, a wonderful person who sometimes relishes playing the role of trickster. Yet despite his conviviality, he doesn’t speak often of his days in Palestine.

I take credit for his emergence as a storyteller. My wife once wondered, “How do you get him to talk so openly about his childhood?”

“It’s simple,” I replied. “I ask him about it.”

I’m damn glad I ask, too. His anecdotes are terrific. Even in the hands of a lesser storyteller, his tales would be interesting simply because of their content.

I love listening to him reflect on life in a West Bank devoid of Jewish settlement. Once enough stories are accumulated, it becomes clear that my father in law adores and embodies the natural history of Palestine. His narrative is filled with flora and fauna: olives, figs, pistachios, pomegranates; birds, gazelles, and reptiles; streams, wells, and aquifers; grape leaves, lavish trellises, and homemade wine.

Zaatar once grew wild throughout the hills surrounding Beit Jala. Children hunted birds with old British shotguns. They could explore the surroundings for miles. Such activities exist no longer. Israel controls nearly all of the harvest. Palestinian children with shotguns—or with stones or with even nothing at all—are targets of occupation soldiers. And there’s no area of the West Bank wild enough for children to explore unfettered; sooner or later they will run into a checkpoint or a settlement.

The same problems affect the Gaza Strip, on a broader but more microcosmic scale. It is likewise true of the Palestinian citizens of Israel and those who inhabit refugee camps throughout the region. The Palestinian landscape is dominated by the structures of division.

Yet animals remain. Olive trees still age into centuries. The Palestinian people are even more attached to their ancestral land. Perhaps this is the natural history of Palestine: the unbelievable endurance of its flora and fauna despite so many threats of eradication; and the persistence of its Indigenes despite the captivity of occupied space.

To the great distress of Zionist leaders who have long anticipated their demise, the Palestinian people, like the many landscapes they inhabit, have displayed an extraordinary talent for reinvention, in this industrialized world a necessary precondition of survival
.

About Steven Salaita

Steven Salaita latest book is Israel's Dead Soul. Find him on Twitter @stevesalaita.

Other posts by Steven Salaita.P- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2015/03/palestine-unnaturally#sthash.dWqHBgUn.dpuf